Nobody's Fool

with Sully and was sorry now to have missed the opportunity.
    Ruth turned to Sully. “I’d like to go home tonight,” she said. “Are you going to leave me a tip or what?”
    â€œI’m half afraid to,” Sully said. “Some not-too-bright person might get the wrong idea.”
    â€œLet him,” Ruth said. “Somebody’s got to make a living in this family.”
    Zack watched his wife pick up the dollar and change Sully put on the table.
    â€œNot the sort of tip that would make anybody suspicious, is it?” she said, stuffing the money into her husband’s shirt pocket. “Can I trust you to act like a grown-up for about two minutes while I get my coat?”
    â€œSure.” Zack shrugged, not looking up from the floor.
    When Ruth was gone, Sully again motioned to the bench across from him, and this time Zack sighed and sat down. He looked so pitiful and unhappy that Sully had half a mind to tell him the truth and promise to reform. “I don’t know, Zachary,” he admitted instead.
    Zack was studying his fingernails now. “Me neither, I guess,” he said.
    Which made Sully laugh.
    Which made Zack grin sheepishly. “I don’t know what I’m worried about even,” he admitted. “Hell, I’m a grandpa and she’s a grandma.”
    â€œMe, too,” Sully said, his knee humming to the tune his grandson Wacker had taught it that morning. “A grandfather, that is.”
    Zack shrugged. “We’re too old to get ourselves arrested for fighting in public, I guess.”
    â€œThat’s assuming that people would recognize it as fighting.”
    Ruth came out with her coat on, stood by the door. “Well,” she barked. “Come on, dumbbell.”
    Sully and Zack exchanged glances. “I think she means you,” Sully said.
    Zack got up slowly. He knew who she meant without having to be told. “You drive,” Ruth told him as they headed out the door. “I want both my hands free.”
    When the door swung shut behind them, Vince came out of the kitchen and started switching off the restaurant’s remaining lights and singing, “Hello, young lovers, wherever you are.” When he pulled the plug on the jukebox, it made a resentful sound before the light went out. “Tell the truth and shame the Devil,” he said. “Are you doing the two-step with young Mrs. Roebuck? Don’t tell me you’re too tired, either.”
    Sully slid out of the booth. “I suppose I could find the energy if she’d have me,” he admitted. It was a question he had never seriously considered. “My guess is she loves her husband. Why is a mystery, but apparently she does.”
    â€œWhat makes you think so?”
    Sully didn’t know why he thought so exactly, but he did. Maybe because she was supposed to. Maybe because every other young woman in Bath seemed to.
    â€œThe reason I ask,” Vince said, “is that I keep hearing she’s involved with somebody in Schuyler.”
    â€œI doubt it,” Sully said, perhaps too quickly.
    â€œYou do?” Vince grinned.
    â€œI do.”
    â€œI don’t.” Vince said. “Know why?”
    â€œNo, why.”
    â€œBecause I don’t want to go through life like that dumb bastard Zack. Twenty years you and Ruth have been giving him horns, and he still can’t make up his feeble mind if it’s true. I’d rather be suspicious than a damn fool.”
    â€œHe’s not too bright, is he?” Sully conceded.
    â€œNot too.”
    Feeling around in the dark for his keys, Sully located the clam and put it into his coat pocket. A clam, as Wirf pointed out, was a small thing, but you never knew when you might need one.
    â€œWhere the hell’s the door?” he said.
    Vince lit his cigarette lighter up next to his face to show where he was. His huge good-natured face reminded Sully of the demonic clown on the billboard outside of town.
    â€œIf I bang my knee between here and there,” Sully warned, “your brother’s going to own two restaurants.”
    The White Horse Tavern had gone, in Sully’s lifetime, from a classy watering hole for the Albany young and well-to-do, a summer haunt of
well-dressed
New Yorkers upstate for the August Thoroughbred meet at Schuyler Springs, to a shabby local restaurant/pub. The completion of the interstate, which allowed New York and Albany